Cymbeline, or, Imogen and the False Reports: Summer in Central Park

Cymbeline is a late play by William Shakespeare, meaning he’d done with the histories, the straight comedies and romances, and was ready for riskier works to be produced indoors in more intimate venues than the Globe.  I decided, as I was ruminating on this production, that this play’s theme has to do with false reports and betrayal. May I assure you, no one onstage or in the audience noticed.

The play has its “problems,” but no one cares, for if it is approached from askew, hilarity ensues.  Daniel Sullivan’s production for The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park (that is, at the Delacorte in Central Park) fits the bill.

Director Sullivan did judicious cutting in his production and incorporated delightful doubling and imaginative additions.  The program lists 14 characters and assorted gentlemen, lords, ladies, soldiers, messengers and captains, all played by nine actors (seven men, two women).

Let’s consider the main character and her love:  Imogen and Posthumous Leonatus.  She the heiress to a kingdom in Wales, he an orphan raised by Imogen’s father, King Cymbeline, the two married in secret.  Also vying for Imogen’s love is Cloten, the cloddish son of the present Queen — who is not mother to any child of Cymbeline.  In comparison to Cloten, Posthumous is a catch. However, judged on his own, Posthumous is a cipher until he becomes an ass.

Lily Rabe as Imogen, Hamish Linklater as Posthumous.  Photo credit (c) 2015 Carol Rosegg.

Thanks to the bravura performance of a problematic role by Hamish Linklater, once in Rome we see the shallow, rudderless fool Posthumous is, and from being a cipher he becomes a fool then turns into an ass.  The utterly charming Mr. Linklater makes him almost pitiable, had he not attempted to pervert his good servant Pisanio (played to perfection by Steven Skybell) to kill his wife Imogen based upon false evidence (from Iachimo, more on him anon) and his own lack of faith.  Not to mention intelligence.

Once her father banishes her husband, Imogen’s only ally at court is Posthumous’ servant Pisanio.  Steven Skybell is punctiliously if oddly dressed, adores his master and his mistress, abhors the Queen and Cloten, and fears the King. 

The wonderful Lily Rabe is Imogen, feisty and foolish, faithful and fierce — she has a temper which delights us as she physically punishes Iachimo for his lascivious behavior in Cymbeline’s court…. In Wales or in Rome, Iachimo lies like a dog on a rug.  But the traditional servant, smarter than his “betters,” saves the day by judicious misleading and lying as any good servant must.   

Banished from Wales, Posthumous does not appear to be suffering overmuch. Among his playmates in Rome is Iachimo, a viscous Italian with money but no work, except perhaps as a nightclub warbler. Daniel Sullivan made a rather tedious scene of male braggadocio into a musical number using Raúl Esparza perfectly.  In a suit a little too shiny, with song stylings a little too slick, this Iachimo crooned like a cross between Sinatra and Dean Martin. He was sleazy, he was oily, he was brilliant. Then a woman dressed like a flapper in a slinky dress and short black wig joined him, and they danced sensuously together. One does not expect a show-stopping number a third of the way through a Shakespeare play, but we got one.

Imogen with Iachimo played by Raúl Esparza.  Photo credit (c) 2015 Carol Rosegg.

Meanwhile back in Wales, the other fool, the loutish Cloten (also played by the brilliant Linklater with a pageboy blond wig that brings to mind a series of dumb movies) attempts to crudely and tunelessly woo his stepsister, since both his mother the queen and his stepfather (clearly on drugs) want the two to marry.

Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a grumpy old pill-popping monarch played gruffly by Patrick Page, who also lends his voice to Posthumous’ patron in Rome, Philario.  Cymbeline’s second wife, the present unnamed Queen and mother of Cloten, is joyously played by Kate Burton, who has a marvelous time with the traditional wicked stepmother.  She also slips into a male identity (alas not a powerful performance), Morgan, who is actually Belarius, long banished from Cymbeline’s court due to false report. 

Hamish Linklater as Cloten, Imogen's stepbrother. Photo credit (c) 2015 Carol Rosegg.

Belarius and Posthumous, both loyal to Cymbeline, are both banished from court doubtless due to the machinations of the comic book evil, poison-dabbling queen, whose little white dog doesn’t even like her — it spends its entire stage time trying to wriggle out of her arms.  Happily the dog is rescued by Cornelius the court doctor played by Teagle F. Bougere, except when he’s playing the Roman ambassador, Lucius.  Or at the same time….

In Rome, there are two layabouts who look rather like the two sycophantic gentlemen in Cymbeline’s Court, and the same two actors are those mountain folk whom Imogen-disguised-as-a-boy falls in with, who are also her long lost brothers.  These multiple characters are snidely, brutishly, and sweetly, respectively, played by David Furr and Jacob Ming-Trent.

Back in Rome, Iachimo finagles a foolish promise from the annoyingly naïve Posthumous that causes all the ruckus with Imogen, which causes her to disguise herself as a boy escaping the court and traveling to Milford Haven.  Whereupon she chances to meet old Belarius, a.k.a. Morgan, and his two sons, who are not his sons at all, but Cymbeline’s missing heirs whom Belarius kidnapped twenty years before when he was wrongly banished from Cymbeline’s court.  And then she mistakes a headless dead guy for her husband.

Got that?

It’s that kind of play.

And I left out a whole lot of stuff.

Back and forth and round and about, the cast members are doubling roles and watching each other as if it’s a play within a play.  And the scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez suggests it is. David Zinn’s costume design and Charles G. Lapointe’s hair and wig design help bring it all together.

All the absurdities of the plot upon plot intertwined with a trope and a meme make light of the heartbreak of Imogen and Posthumous.  The actors do not.  There is funny work done by all, and some heartbreaking work as well.  This production of Cymbeline most certainly works; just don’t think too hard, it tangles the brain.

As tradition happily has it, all the confusing plots and sub-plots are tied up by evening’s end, and celebrated with an antic and acrobatic dance choreographed by Mimi Lieber, making for a wholly delightful evening in Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre with a fine company of players.

~ Molly Matera, apologizing for taking so long to write this – there is a bit more than a week to go in the run of this summer production, so get yourself to the virtual or actual line for Shakespeare in the Park!

The Surprising TFANA Tamburlaine — Still Running Red!

Theatre for a New Audience continues to use its new space at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center well.  This time they’ve provided the opportunity to see Marlowe’s Tamburlaine for the first — and presumably last — time.

For some gladsome reason Michael Boyd decided to cut the two 3-4 hour plays that comprise Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2, into one play that runs about 2 ½ hours with 30 minutes in the middle to give the stage crew time to mop up all the blood during intermission.  The play may not be so bloody as Evil Dead the Musical nor The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and yet it holds its own.

The play follows a chronological and geographical structure as Tamburlaine (a Scythian shepherd who has turned to raiding and marauding and gathering followers along the way), goes from territory to territory in Africa and Asia to conquer and control. While this pointless continuation of killing for titles appears illogical to a modern audience, that doesn’t keep the playwright from moving from one place on a map (he loves place names!) to the next, so Tamburlaine can kill one king, regent, prince after another.  It’s mad.  And it’s bold.  The battle between religious groups is nothing new — Marlowe has some Christian king breaking his word to Muslims, Muslims betray one another, and the only one who wins is the Scythian marauder Tamburlaine, who claims the title of every man he kills — King of Persia, Emperor of Turkey, Kings of Fez, Morocco, Argier, the map expands as the play continues.  It certainly sounds like nothing much has changed since Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine around 1587 and the present.  The maps have merely expanded to more land and changed some names.

I offer immense kudos to director/editor Michael Boyd as well as gratitude since I’m not likely to sit through two nights of four hours of bloodletting however heightened the language.  The theatricality of the blood-letting is admirable, the effects horrifying — although the gallons of blood did not compare to the tossing of a single cut-off tongue, which left us all aghast.  Tamburlaine goes beyond beyond, and even the come-uppance of dis-likable characters goes too far.  Mind you, there are a lot of laughs in this production of Tamburlaine, particularly from the ever off-kilter Saxon Palmer.  Add to him the delightful Steven Skybell, Matthew Amendt, Chukwudi Iwuji in an extraordinary performance going from the heights to the pits... really the whole cast is marvelous.

John Douglas Thompson and Chukwudi Iwuji (Photo Credit Gerry Goodstein)

The brilliant, amazing, lovably terrifying John Douglas Thompson as Tamburlaine the Great is a requirement for a play like this, and Mr. Thompson can carry it.  Although I cannot understand quite how his (or anyone’s) rhetoric could lead Theridamas (Andrew Hovelson) to betray his country or king (etc.), nor to persuade his captive to happily become a wife, Thompson’s Tamburlaine was magical and funny and oddly down-to-earth.  And quite mad, of course.  No resting on his laurels, no matter how many he conquered — he just liked the conquering.  Merritt Janson did fine work as Tamburlaine’s other conquest, the unlikely wife, Zenocrate (daughter of the Soldan of Egypt).  Nilanjana Bose was more than convincing as Olympia, the conquered woman still loyal to her husband even in death. 

Of all the wonderful actors in this play, I think my favorite was Paul Lazar, who set us up to laugh from the opening, so we knew it would be OK to laugh through the bloodletting as he played the doomed King of Persia, later the Soldan of Egypt, and finally Almeda the Jailor. 

Finally, the choreography by Sam Pinkleton, music by Arthur Solari, fight direction by J. Allen Suddeth all worked together to bring us this remarkable piece edited and directed by Mr. Boyd with dramaturgy by Jonathan Kalb.  Rather than rolling over in his grave at the massive cuts to his scripts, I suspect Mr. Marlowe is grinning ear to ear at this modern re-telling.  After all, everyone but writers know that less is more.

Alas, I saw this play near the end of its run so recommending it is practically a pointless exercise — EXCEPT that run has been extended through January 4^th.  http://www.tfana.org/season-2015/tamburlaine/overview  Do your darnedest to make it there — otherwise, just keep an eye out for anything edited or directed by Michael Boyd, and anything in which John Douglas Thompson appears.  Well done, TFANA.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, probably for the last post this year….or maybe not….